Pixiq

I can't help but think that Fujifilm might be onto something here with its premium X-series of cameras. Canon and Nikon have sewn up the dSLR market; the mirror-less sandpit is getting increasingly crowded (athough rumours are rife that Fuji does have something up its sleeve); so they're going to produce a range of really gorgeous and super-high quality cameras that draw a little bit from here, a little bit from there, and are generally so appealing that people just want to have one. At this point, the price is by-the-by. Dare I say it, it's all a little bit Apple. And to this niche of beautifully designed products that somehow manage to be luxury and functional simultaneously, they've just added a bridge camera. It's the X-S1.

Lens, sensor, and processor

The lens is a 26× optical zoom, which has a 35mm equivalent to 24-624mm and a maximum aperture of f/2.8. If that degree of zoom isn't quite enough for you, then you can roll out the digital armoury and extend it to an astonishing 52×, with allegedly no drop in image quality. There's a minimum focusing distance of 30cm, but flick on the Super Macro Mode and you should be able to get as close as 1cm.

It's a 2/3-inch, 12 megapixel EXR CMOS sensor, which is the same as those going into the X10, and contains some fairly exciting stuff. These sensors let you switch between three different modes depending on the light. There's high resolution for bright conditions; wide dynamic range allows you pick up heaps of detail in contrasty scenes; and high sensitivity and low noise is, predictably, for low-light situations. Of course, if you're not up for fiddling with sensor modes, you could just leave it in auto.

Along with the EXR sensor comes the EXR processor: 0.01 shutter lag; seven frames-per-second continuous shooting at full resolution, but in JPEG, or up to ten frames-per-second continuous shooting if you're happy to drop the resolution to six megapixels.

Video and viewfinder

Naturally no camera worth making at the moment comes without video mode, so of course it has capability to record full high definition (1920 x 1080 pixels) video with stereo sound at 30 frames-per-second.

You don't get anything nearly as exciting as the X100's hybrid viewfinder in the X-S1, but it does have a bright elecrtonic viewfinder and a rear LCD screen. The LCD screen is tiltable and comes with daylight mode so you can actually see something on it when it's sunny.

RAW, manual, and ISO

If you couldn't actually take control of shooting, there'd be no point in marketing it as a premium camera, so it comes fully fledged with programme, aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual modes with RAW capability. But there's also the auto mode which selects the scene mode depending on the subject for the 'perfect result'. Or what the camera thinks is perfect, rather than the photographer.

Sensitivity ranges from ISO 100 to 3,200 in auto mode, but you can override that and get it as high as ISO 12,800 if you really, really want to.

And finally...

And there are a couple of elegant toys thrown into the mix, too: a film simulation function and a 360 degree motion panorama option.

If it's anything like the X100, or the X10, then Fuji might just be on to something, even if you do see bridge cameras not so much as a bridge between compacts and dSLRs, rather something stuck in no-man's-land with too much of this and not enough of that. We'll have to wait until February next year to find out, and part with £699 of our hard-earned cash for the privilege, too.